The Family Remains(60)
He let her go with another megawatt smile and then, just as she passed him, he said, ‘Hey! By the way! Ella tells me you’ve scored a big contract. With Liberty. I mean, that is immense! Totally!’
Rachel’s mouth went dry. She stopped and turned back and looked from Michael to Ella and said, ‘How – how did you know about that?’
Ella dropped her gaze to the pavement. ‘Dom told me.’
‘Dom—’
‘Yeah, I saw her last week. She told me about it.’
‘Dom? Erm, hold on – does she know? About you two?’ She flapped her arm at them.
Ella flushed slightly and looked up at Michael. Then she shook her head.
‘So, you went out with my best friend and let her tell you things, personal, private things about me, and she doesn’t even know that you’re’ – she flapped her arm at them again – ‘whatever it is you’re doing?’
‘Oh, come on now. It’s no big deal,’ said Michael. ‘We’re keeping this quiet for now. That’s all. There’s no big conspiracy. I mean, would I have come over to you and said hello if we were trying to hide anything?’
Rachel did not respond. Michael cocked his eyebrow at her patronisingly. ‘Anyway, Rachel, it’s great to see you looking so well. And congrats on the Liberty thing. Seriously. You totally deserve it.’
And then they were gone, and Rachel was left on the pavement, her feet rooted to the spot, her legs unable to move, her heart chilled as ice.
44
June 2019
Samuel
It took a full twenty-four hours for us to obtain a warrant to look at Libby Jones’s bank details. During those twenty-four hours, we received the report from the arborist. He confirmed that the trees overhanging the house on Cheyne Walk were indeed London planes, trees of heaven and Persian silk, the exact trees that had formed the basis of the mulch found attached to the remains of Birdie Dunlop-Evers.
We had what we needed. Proof that Birdie’s body had been kept on the roof of number sixteen Cheyne Walk. I experienced a warm feeling of euphoria and sat at my desk smiling for a while.
Donal and I return to Cheyne Walk now, to join the crime scene detectives and Saffron Brown, the forensic investigator.
‘Hi, Sam,’ says Saffron. ‘Good to see you.’
‘Good to see you, too,’ I say and I notice Donal mouth the word ‘Sam’ at me and smile strangely whilst wriggling his eyebrows. I roundly ignore him and turn back to Saffron.
‘I am very sorry for leaving footprints on the roof. I hope it hasn’t hindered your operation?’
‘Not at all, Sam. No problem. But come and look at this.’
We follow her to the bottom of the garden, just past a tree with a circular bench built around it. Here there is a tall wall, grown over entirely with a thick, ropey wisteria. Another forensic investigator is crouched down over a flower bed, pulling items from the soil on to a sheet of plastic. My stomach lurches with shock and I hear Donal gasp.
Bones.
Small white bones.
‘Not what you’re thinking, Sam, don’t worry,’ says Saffron. ‘They’re actually cat bones. Look, here, the skull?’ She picks it up and shows it to us. It is clearly the skull of a small animal and I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘And look,’ she says, guiding us to a spot closer to the back of the house. ‘See this?’ She points at a rectangle of soil. ‘This is where Justin Redding’s herb garden used to be. And these’ – she indicates a pair of large terracotta pots – ‘are the pots that the Atropa belladonna was grown in, that the owners and the mystery man used to poison themselves with back in 1994.’ She beams at me and I can tell she is loving the unfurling gothic narrative almost as much as I am.
Donal and I leave Saffron and her team there and return to the station, where we re-examine the police reports from the time of the ‘suicide pact’ bodies being found.
PCs Robbin and Shah had been the first to enter the house the day of the anonymous phone call. They had been followed later on by a crime scene team, and a special family liaison officer called Felicity Measures who dealt with the baby, and the two older Lamb children, Henry and Lucy, had never been traced. The house, according to the police reports, had been filled with strange suggestions of a somewhat cult-like history. The suicide note had been initialled by the dead: ML, HL, DT. Missing persons reports had been extensively trawled at the time looking for someone with the initials DT who matched the mystery corpse’s approximate age and appearance, but no one had ever been found and the search was abandoned three years later.
Miller Roe’s article in the Guardian suggested a similar dead end during his own investigation in 2015. Although the last line of the article held a glimmer of tantalising hope:
And then, just last week, I found a possible DT. A family man, arrived from France in 1988 at the age of forty-two with his wife and two children, but never heard from again. Only when his mother was close to death in 2006 was a missing person report filed, but the police were unable to trace him and now in 2015 neither am I. So, another dead end, another unpassable road, another mystery to add to the unending mysteries in the case of Serenity Lamb and her rabbit’s foot.
But Miller Roe has still not replied to my email, and he is still not answering his phone. In desperation I ask for his address to be brought to me from the system. I am told he lives in South Norwood, and I waste an hour of my life driving there and back only to find his flat locked and empty. The upstairs neighbour tells me that Miller Roe doesn’t spend much time at home these days, that he lives mostly with his girlfriend. I ask the neighbour if he knows where the girlfriend lives, and he does not but he tells me that he will be sure to tell Miller that I came, if he ever sees him again.